


the floodgates need repair

by girljustdied



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2019-09-30 18:16:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17228831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girljustdied/pseuds/girljustdied
Summary: karen struggles to put the pieces back together again.





	the floodgates need repair

**Author's Note:**

> post "i’m already dead," basically.  
> prompt was "this is the unforgiving light of the morning, time to drop the illusion."

Her shoulder is dislocated. She understands that, after, kneeling in the road. Had mistaken the air sucking straight out of her for the trail of blood leading into the woods. The pain for the anguished pleas drilling through her mind, insistent, screaming to be heard. The bile rising in her throat for Frank slamming the door between them, the gunshot.  
  
Knees scraped up by the gravel she can feel the bone poking forward, the shape of her shoulder all wrong.  
  
Frank had touched her there, before. Protected her from a hail of bullets and then put his hands on her in the aftermath. Her skull, her throat, her shoulders, her sides—a no-frills search for bullet wounds.  
  
“How’d you know they’d come for me next?” she’d stage whispered in the safety of her building’s concrete stairwell.  
  
“I didn’t.”  
  
“You didn’t.”  
  
“No, ma’am.”  
  
Then why—  
  
She hadn’t been able to find her voice then, but he’d answered the unspoken all the same, “Just figured you might be the only person on the planet who’d believe me.” A huff of air where a laugh could’ve been, then, “Course now you don’t have to.”  
  
Palms jammed against her temples to dull the noise in there, “What? Don’t have to what?”  
  
“You don’t have to believe me. Now you just know.”  
  
Yes, now she knows.  
  
She tries the truck first, telling herself that it’d have a better likelihood of surviving the crash, but the mangled clanging from the crushed engine proves her wrong immediately. Cries bitterly at the scraping noises, the bum arm limp at her side, barely able to see straight.  
  
Her brother had popped his shoulder out once in a fight. Jammed it right back in after despite her protests that they should go to the emergency room.  
  
Told her after he’d thrown up by the side of the road: “Google it, Kar, you’ll see. The earlier you do it the better.”  
  
She doesn’t have the courage. Stares at Ben’s impacted passenger side from the truck’s driver’s seat and thinks this is what Frank saw. Thinks, is this what it’s like to be a god? Saved her life, and then saved it again, and then left her for dead. Sounds right. Gods were fickle that way.  
  
Phone smashed beyond repair and feeling out of options, she limps back to Ben’s car and leans bodily against the open door, frozen, afraid to learn its fate. Instead of sliding into the seat, she reaches in over the steering wheel to grasp the key with her good hand, takes a breath, and turns it. The car jumps to life, and she jerks back in surprise, a started “Oh!” finding its way past her lips and echoing out into the darkness around her.  
  
Still kicking. She might as well follow suit.  
  
Moving her arm to brace it against the hood is excruciating. Her vision blacks out for a split-second. But then, just as she’s psyching herself up to try and jam her bones back into place—  
  
Footsteps. A voice:  
  
“Stop.”  
  
Frank.  
  
“You’re doing it wrong,” the sound too close, near her in what feels like an instant.  
  
She blinks, dizzy, knees weak, “Don’t touch me.”  
  
Almost believes she’s imagining him. The dead man.  
  
“C’mon, you’re gonna make it worse.”  
  
To the universe: “How much worse could it be, really?”  
  
“Worse,” Frank answers, maddeningly.  
  
He did this to her. He could fix it. That’s what she tells herself as her steps gravitate towards him. Little stumble steps over rocky earth, relief just at the edge of her senses.  
  
“Take off your coat.”  
  
“No.” Automatic. Then, “Why?”  
  
He unties the loose belt of her jacket, face twisted up. Gets the sleeve off her good shoulder first, then the other, breath hot on her cheeks.  
  
Both his palms circle the elbow of the injured arm lightly, “You ready?”  
  
On the edge of hysterics, “No.”  
  
He bends her arm at the elbow until it’s at a ninety-degree angle, ignoring her yelp at the motion. Rotates her shoulder outward firmly as she squirms against his chest, teeth gnashing in an effort to reign herself in.  
  
Still, there’s a whimpering sound that must be her.  
  
Her shoulder finally rights itself with a muffled snap; he lets her go.  
  
The pain is still there but abstract, further away. She can curl her fingers again. Grasps the sleeve of his jacket in a loose fist when he tries to retreat.  
  
“Don’t be stupid, lady,” he’s barely audible, and she finds herself squinting to watch his mouth move. “Get in the car. Go home.”  
  
She remembers how the prison guards had sneered at her—sneered at how often she found herself needing to be across a table from Frank. And Reyes, condescending, “I don’t care how much time you spent in an interrogation room with him.” Foggy’s disbelief. Matt’s pity. Ellison and the folder containing the last scraps of her secrets.

They didn’t know the half of it. She made sure of that a long time ago.

But under fluorescent penitentiary lights, she’d almost told Frank everything:

“I know what it’s like to want answers. Okay? I do.” Could not stop looking at his hands chained to the table. She knew that, too. “I—”

“I don’t want answers.”

“No?”

“I want to exterminate every last goddamn scumbag—”

Red cheeked, “Frank.”

“I want peace. I want it done.”

She let out the breath she’d been holding in a high-pitched whine, “Done, huh?”

A curt nod. His eyes on every tick, every flinch, every flutter of her eyelashes.

“Bullshit. Say I knew who was at the top—say I gave you a name, say you murdered him. Brutally.”

“Nothing rhetorical about that situation.”

“How about this, then: say I’d lied? Say I never told you, and let you live every day thinking it was finished. Would you care?”

“What kind of ass-backwards question is that?”

“Answers matter. That’s all I’m saying, Frank.”

“You have any for me or not?”

Should have said: The truth matters. It can be enough it you let it.

Should have known better.

Now here they stand. First light still hours away, the one working headlight from Ben’s car illuminating the space, their ragged exhales turning to steam in the winter air. Oh, and Frank’s last shot at redemption with a bullet between the eyes.

“You said you were done with me. That’s good.” His stillness betrays him; he’s not going anywhere. “Be done.”

Her knees dip to the ground for a second time that night instead.

“How do you feel?” she shifts her grip to hold onto his hand to keep upright. His skin is rough, and hot to the touch. “Is it over?”

“I’m tired.”

God, she is so tired. Presses her mouth to his split knuckles before leaning her forehead against the back of his hand.

“If I told you—” the words dissolve into a sudden hitch of sobs. His fingers twitch against hers. “If I told you I—”

“You don’t have to tell me shit.”

“—would you?”

He takes her disjointed confession in stride. “No.”

Her body slumps with relief, with disappointment, with bone-aching weariness. He scoops her up in a fireman carry over his shoulder, gets her into the backseat of the car. With eyes closed she listens to him load heavy bags into the trunk with muted but telling clangs before clambering into the driver’s seat. The vibration of the car pulling further and further away from the shed in the woods lulls her to sleep.

All I wanted to do was help you, she doesn’t say. All I wanted to do was help somebody. For once.

“That all?” he asks dryly.

In her dream she’s grown, but so has the broom closet in her parent’s house. She’s not alone.

“You shouldn’t eat that shit,” Frank indicates the gingersnaps dusting her palms.

“You don’t play nice,” she accuses. “Now. Count down to liftoff, if you please. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Ten,” his lips on her ear. “Nine,” his hands in her hair. “Eight—”

In a straddle over his lap now, breath caught in her chest, rocking together, “Seven. Six. Five—quiet—quiet—they’ll hear.”

“Four, “ he crushes her back down into a carpet covered with crumbs.

No, up.

“Three,” she laughs, “two,” she cries.

Wakes in her own bed with a splitting pain in her temple, the thick crust of blood there cracking with her movement. Her second-hand mattress isn’t much worse off being full of bullets. The walls are likely another story, but it was still early enough in the morning for her studio to be mostly shadows. The boards the landlord had temporarily put up over her shattered windows don’t exactly help the sun shine in.

She’s afraid to say his name. Doesn’t want to call out to an empty room. Sits up with a groan to find Frank on the floor, her files open in his lap.

Her “hi” is shrill and tinny.

“You should go to the ER,” all business, his gaze flicking up to take stock of her.

“My shoulder’s gonna be fine. Same thing happened to my brother once and he was okay after he popped it back in—no doctor necessary, promise.”

Frank taps his forehead in response, and when Karen mirrors him her fingertips come away with blood.

“Crap,” she sighs. Stitches, she’ll probably need stitches. “Why are you still here?”

His mouth tugs at the edges, somewhere between a smile and a grimace, “You were out of it. Now you’re not. I’ll get out of your hair.”

For good, just unspoken. He might be the reason she was alive but he was also the reason she was a mess of blood and bruises, body sore and mind chaotic. He couldn’t stop. Neither could she.

“Wait,” she blurts out, one foot touching down to the floor from the bed. Gesturing towards the cut in her forehead, “Could you—could you help with this?”

He’s standing now. Regards her carefully. “Don’t think that’s a good idea, ma’am. Not if you want it to heal neat.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

Maybe she just wants it done.

The light in the bathroom is a physical assault on the senses—one they both flinch at when she hits the switch. She swallows three aspirins in preparation, then sits on the edge of her tub with a small sewing kit held gingerly between both hands.

He soaks a cotton ball with rubbing alcohol and says, “This is gonna hurt.”

“Can’t be as bad as last night, right?”

“Nah.”

He presses the cotton down against the cut at her hairline, clearing away the dried blood before cleaning out the wound with firm, short stokes that make her hiss. He hushes her lightly, trying to soothe her. Eases the kit from her too-tight grip, then threads a needle himself with surprising ease.

“You ready?” his free palm laid flat across her forehead.

She nods into his touch, clenched jaw keeping any words from coming out. He pinches the skin together and pushes the needle through simultaneously, his movements quick and efficient.

Tears leaking from her eyes, struggling to pull together the courage beg him to pause for just a second before she loses it, he murmurs: “One more.”

Okay.

She doesn’t realize she’d started laughing until he grunts, “Hold still.”

Bites her lip and does just that.

“You did good,” he tells her, after, hands on her cheeks. “Hey, look at me, you did good.”

The tears have stopped but her voice still sounds like a sob, “I shouldn’t have to.”

She imagines he must not have a response to that when he lets her go. He passes her gauze and tape from the medicine cabinet and moves to stand in the doorway, but then finally speaks when she rises shakily to examine his work in the mirror.

“Are you gonna stop digging, Miss Page?”

Six stitches. She thinks six stitches are more than enough for him to call her by her first name. She lays the gauze down on the edge of the sink for later.

“For what happened to you, or in general?” A pointless question—the answer’s the same.

He snorts, “Both.”

“I can’t,” bursts out with more force than she’d intended. When she turns to face him, he backs out into the main room. She follows. “It doesn’t make me happy but it makes me—it makes me—”

He’s at the front door now. “Whole?”

She shrugs, “I don’t know if that’s the word.”

“We really gonna argue semantics here?”

“I want to help people the law’s failing. But I’m not a soldier.” She’s not a killer. “Pulling the threads together, writing about it, that’s what I can do.”

“If you’re gonna be on the front lines you’d better be ready to shoot.”

Her head is throbbing.

“Look, Frank. I meant what I said. I can’t do this with you anymore.”

He straightens a picture frame on her wall.

“I know,” he murmurs, and leaves.

She locks the door behind him with shaking hands and crawls back into bed. There, with eyes closed, too exhausted to feel anything, it’s almost as if she’d never met him.


End file.
